In April 2021, domain marketplace Sedo sold Link.co for $162,000, marking one of the largest .co sales of the year. According to NameBio, the sale of Link.co also ranks as the third-largest publicly-disclosed .co sale of all time.
For months, the identity of the buyer was unknown. The domain transferred to a privacy-protected Com Laude account, suggesting that the domain was acquired by a corporation thanks to Com Laude’s modus operandi as a corporate domain management company.
Over a year after the sale, we now know that Link.co was acquired by payment processing platform Stripe. The company, founded in 2010, has raised $2.2 billion in disclosed funding including a $600 million Series H round in 2021 that valued the company at $95 billion.
Link.co hosts Link, a Stripe-branded one-click payment facility. Stripe initially introduced saved payments in 2014 but the company renamed and reintroduced this facility as Link in 2021. The Link.co domain hosts a simple site allowing users to manage their Stripe Link account.
Link.co’s big brother, Link.com is for sale at Sedo with a minimum offer value of $1 million at the time of writing. Would Stripe, which operates on Stripe.com, do well to acquire Link.com, too?